The Juice

The other passengers smiled at the holo, thoroughly entranced. It gave them something to do other than staring at me. Not that I blamed them. My mass of pewter and black hair, scruffy faux-ostrich leather jacket, ripped cowboy boots—and most of all, my golden skin tone—were so different from their drab, ragged clothing and more varied complexions. The underground was the province of the lower class, not the extremely small Elite ranking of society that I’d been born into nearly 30 years before. My clothes were more offbeat than most Elites, who were artfully groomed, but it didn’t hide my origins.

As Señor KickingBird went through his antics, a school chum, Thom Tseng, came to mind. In younger days, when we were at MIT in Massachusetts, the two of us had personal holo graffiti collections. We were obsessed with finding every single version of KickingBird on the OuterNet. It was a diversion from all the serious frustration we were going through trying to make some experiments work at school.

There in the subway, KickingBird went through a blur of slasher moves leaping from seat to seat like a big ol’ butterball, never speaking, just whooping. As a grand finale, he sunk his tomahawk into the ceiling, causing a red rain to sparkle down and fill the floor with a virtual lake of fizzy pomegranate juice. The bedraggled people around me went wild with applause.

Then the vision stopped. My skin prickled as the face transformed into a gold saucer, and then into Thom, with his mashup of Asian features. The left side of his face was mutilated with flaming wounds, and there was a black hole where his eye should have been. His right cheek was covered with ghoulish bruises, and his mouth quivered with pain.

Under normal circumstances, nobody could look down his nose as arrogantly as my friend. He had a self-confident swagger, and his eyes were constantly flickering as the computer chips in his head worked on multiple lines of thought. It was hard not to envy his brilliance.

It took considerable effort to hide my horror at his gruesome transformation. No one in the subway car was reacting. This last part was a private vision from Thom directly to me. I swiped the air like I was merely taking a call on my mobile so that nobody would think I was talking to the holo.